Step 5: Ta da!!

So you guys all know you can make pens out of feathers, right? Well a while ago in my weirdo body-modder kind of way I decided to try and do a similar thing with fingernails (You know, FOR SCIENCE). Several weeks and broken fingernails later I discovered that such a thing is not only possible but AWESOME. Your turn!

Loved this Instructable, Smexy! I've messed around with my nails for a long time since they grow so dang fast! (And I hated the process of cutting them; and never chewed them.)
Thankfully, I was always considered a somewhat strange little boy, so everyone just thought that was me being me. (Lots of girls would tell me that they'd love to be able to "trade" nails with me though. And any attention from the girls was always nice.)
I never got around to trying the nail-pen thing, but I've had claws every now and then. I'd usually only have one or two per hand at a time, like the pinky and the ring, or the pinky and the thumb. I even created a double claw out of one nail before.
Don't even ask about my ingrown toenail problems, and the home surgery I once performed. Didn't hurt too much, but bled like a stuck pig when finished. I could have written my magnum opus with my big toe if I hadn't been feeling so woozy!
Anyhoo...

This whole thing reminds me that a "pen knife" was so named because it was a small knife you could easily carry around that was used to whittle a pen out of a quill whenever you needed one. Apparently geese were running around everywhere and a new quill fresh off the bird was better than an old, tired, dried out one. And goose quills were somehow preferable to duck or chicken feathers.
They also had "pen wipers" to wipe the pen of excess ink or blobs of gunk that you end up scratching off of the cheesy paper.
Ah, what we forget from the good old days.

You could use fake fingernails and do the same thing without risking cutting yourself . Do the prep work on the nail then glue it on...

From looking at the thumbnail for this ible I thought you had somehow transplanted some strange pen tip onto your finger...
Do you think this would work with fake nails? They probably wouldn't bend enough though...

That takes some freaking dedication. I don't think I would go that long without biting them down!

How about breaking them in pliers? I would have to postpone computers and building for a while lol.

I would have to stop instructables entirely! I type too fast to actually think about where my nails would be.

Personally, I find it kind of strange...

Why thank you! :D

Maybe drill a hole in the nail at the end of the slit just like a real pen nib. It acts as a little reservoir for the ink and reduces the stress fracture of the nail.
And wouldn't you want to use real blood as the ink?

That was the plan, actually. I wanted to get comfortable writing with the nail before I tried that though, and I broke the nail yesterday :( Oh well, this was only the first attempt and I've definitely learned from it. Next one will be better!
I considered the hole, but the space between nail and skin acts as a very effective reservoir without it.

Neat!
Hopefully you can keep more of the nails intact next time, and do some rainbow-colored multi-finger writing. Would a one-sided coat of clear polish to strengthen the nail also screw up the ink flow?

Instead of growing our your nails for a million years, you could also get a gel or acrylic nail put on and then file it down!

But that would be infinitely less cool.

I have no idea how well this would work with a fake nail. The reason this works like a quill pen is that fingernails are made of the same material as feather shafts (keratin). Acrylic nails are a lot thicker and would be very hard to shape/cut. Why don't youtry itand tell me how it goes?

Better to use an 'adapter' so that you don't have wickedly long nails

Well you could do that, but it'd be a whole different project. The whole purpose of this endeavor was to make a tool out of my body.